Americans may soon live under a federal privacy law – a mere two decades after the US Federal Trade Commission urged Congress to regulate online data collection. The largely unrestrained sale of online data has made a mockery of the concept of privacy. In May 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked Congress to pass a data privacy law, but federal legislation did not flow. At the state level, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act passed in 2008 and has been used.
With respect to data brokers that sell marketing products, the Commission recommends that Congress consider legislation requiring data brokers to provide consumers access to their data – including sensitive data held about them – at a reasonable level of detail, and the ability to opt out of having it shared for marketing purposes. Again, US lawmakers didn't respond to the challenge and, as a result, online privacy suffered. But in 2018, Europe enacted its General Data Protection Regulation